Where is health? (part 3)

I’m thinking of all for whom feeling Health’s loving, potentising embrace while lying on a massage table during a Biodynamic craniosacral session is a luxury.

I’m thinking of all in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Mali and many other places suffering under the ruthless might of tyrants and warmongers, places where genocide and bombings of civilians are common currency. 

I’m thinking of all who decided to end their internal warfare, up against a wall of meaninglessness, ’enough is enough’, unable to seek their way out of a well of despair, of impossibilities.

I’m thinking of all drowning their isolation and lack of support under alcohol and hard drugs, deadly addictions of one kind or another, for whom ending the struggle means numbing and dampening all the pain ever more ‘efficiently’ while burying themselves deeper under the rubbles of a white patriarchal supremacy; a neglectful, racist, sexist, and reckless capitalist model where only very few thrive to the detriment of and at the expense of the majority.

I’m thinking of all who we consistently ‘forget’ or omit because we’ve internalised long ago that they simply don’t matter: all non human life annihilated under tar sands, quarries, housing and all forms of developments such as road constructions, by pesticide and herbicide sprays, artificial fertilisers, chemical effluents, plastic and hazardous waste dumped anywhere and in landfills, rivers, lakes or at sea… The list goes on and on of the many deleterious ways we preempt and kill life and health in our one and only, precious earthly home.

Where is Health in such conditions? How can it express itself to the fullest of its ability? What does optimum health even mean and is it worth pursuing such a striving goal?

In contrast I’m writing this while listening to a symphony of birds on a gorgeous Easter Sunday in a wild biodiverse garden where plants and insects thrive, immersed in peace and beauty. So much health and Health here fully express through these many beings, all ‘intersinging’ their songs together in gorgeous harmony. So blessed and privileged to partake in this breathing. So grateful that I can travel to enjoy and look after this piece of land filled with love that keeps rippling.

Back home in Ireland a community of us share allotments reflecting this care for the land in regenerative ways. It’s possible to re-seed, to restore soil over time by stewarding Health so that it can breathe through unimpeded.  “Undiseasable” Health sustains all life, even if plying under much strain and overwhelming traumas. It’s always there if we can give it time.

Teacher and cranial osteopath James Jealous, DO says: “The background in which life occurs has meaning. I believe that any healing art needs to help individuals find the way to a deeper reality than a biomolecular model of health.” So that “Holistic is seeing the Spirit, Soul, Body as a Whole.” 

We holistic practitioners “support the health of the Whole”, we do not “destroy the disease”. (Alternative Therapies. January 1997.Vol 3. No 1)

A tutor of mine back in my biodynamic craniosacral study days once told me she felt the drive or potency of Health, which we also call the ‘Breath of Life’, had lessened in the land around where she lived. She could feel its restricted expression, its struggle mirroring the struggle of its living communities. 

In times like these holistic practitioners also need ever more support, ever more vitality and resilience to give without burning themselves out. We need the strongest and most nourished anchoring in service to the forces deploying Health. 

All these restrictions (shrinking biodiversity in the land and in our biomes) are due to chronic stressors which manifest as chronic inflammation and chronic illnesses in our bodies. I heard renowned herbalist Andrew Chevallier quote a physician who defined the effects of stress as like being in an airtight room filled with cigarette smoke. This kind of stress is increasingly felt by western bodies compressed and tensed up while trying to meet all the demands placed on them every day to meet their basic needs of food and shelter, water and heat, while wading through the relentless flow of tragedy many of us must cope with locally and globally. This in turn erodes the quality of our relationships in inexistent, broken down communities. Illness is what happens when the fabric of our vitality fails to counter the weight of such breakdowns.

Where is health when crippled by depression and anxiety, when you see no way out and stand on the edge of a cliff face? It’s ever so challenging to ground and resource oneself, to hang on to the wish to keep on living which health breathes in all of us in increasingly more dire circumstances. It’s easy to give up when you simply can’t face the chaos, can’t hang on to life and pull back from the abyss.

It’s a luxury for many of us to take a pause and slow down, look after oneself, buy all the right foods, exercise, socialise, sleep well, do all that will support our health and stay vital.  

In fact the majority of those who look after our health in the medical mainstream, most need to slow down, resource and revitalise, but simply cannot afford to because of the ever growing demands placed on an under resourced system bursting at the seams.

Our disconnect from the land and from its vital forces has turned our abilities to thrive into mere survival.  We need to “reseed” ourselves to revitalise our reciprocal relationships with the land. As stated in the excellent Inflamed by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel: “The wellspring of culture comes from the way in which we feed and nurture ourselves.”

How can we feed and nurture this wellspring back to vital aliveness? There are many ways to support and participate in this ‘holy’ task. The regenerative projects of professor of medicine, physician and activist Rupa Marya in California and now in Ireland connecting our health with revitalised soils give me great hope. The insatiable work and words of the late Manchán Magan and its many followers inviting us to “listen to the land speak”, and promoting ways to sense with and tend to the wild nourish my spirit. Like the ever growing number of people interested in herbal medicine and wild foraging forming communities around this love of plants, fungi, and ancestral traditions. Talking and listening to trees and other plants is no longer the strangest thing it once was.

Tending to the land also means tending to its people. Supporting the tremendous prison and community work of herbalist, teacher and activist Nicole Rose of Solidarity Apothecary for example also feeds my soul.

Tending to my relationships in all the ways I can always fuels my relationship with myself too: a mutual symbiotic nourishment.

Facilitating a return to balance and harmony in an organism during a biodynamic craniosacral session is also ‘holy’ work which ignites and enhances my awe and sense of wonder, my deep gratitude to Health.

Like fungal mycorrhizal networks, the more we create and feed reciprocal, symbiotic relationships with the living, the more resilient we become. This can regenerate the broken, wounded connective tissues of our communities, creating islands of coherence which restore balance and harmony in the Whole.

As James Jealous says: “we are part of nature’s art”. So let’s create together.

Listen to Nick Cave’s plea: 

“…my advice to you is to fully offer up your messy, broken, limited, disastrous human self to the act of creation, and through that eternal alchemical sleight of hand, write a song that is new, beautiful, and awe-inspiring. And then go and do it again. Become the all-singing, all-dancing, all-human answer to this most dark and demoralised question: “This world has no meaning. Why fucking bother?””

The Red Hand Files.